TPN Europe 2018: ‘We practise what we invent’, says IBM
When faced with the allegation that IBM is the “world’s largest patent troll”, William LaFontaine, general manager of IP at the company, was keen to defend its record, claiming that “we practise what we invent”.
LaFontaine spoke at Technology Patent Network (TPN) Europe in London yesterday, June 21.
When introducing the panel discussion, Dafydd Bevan, partner at Marks & Clerk, referred to research by IP database Darts-IP that legal action related to non-practising entities (NPEs) has grown by 19% year-on-year since 2007.
Bevan said that the “overwhelming view” of NPEs in the press is “negative” and that “IBM has been described in the press as the world’s largest patent troll”.
In response, LaFontaine explained that IBM does “have a very large patent portfolio” but “we practise the patents that we file”.
He added that “we’ve done a large number of licences”, but “there are people in the current climate who don’t want to pay for a licence”.
Despite this, LaFontaine said IBM usually takes “quite a while” before taking legal action as the company tries to avoid litigation.
When the company is approached by NPEs with claims that their proprietary technology is being used by IBM, the company reacts in different ways depending on the situation.
There are cases where an inventor comes forward with “innovative stuff”, but “then you have the other side when it’s simply financial arbitrage”, LaFontaine added.
Ultimately, “if you’re using someone’s technology, you need to pay for it”, he said. “If someone has something of value and is asking a large company to pay what’s appropriate, that makes sense”.
However, LaFontaine said IBM will react “aggressively” if an NPE is really trying to give the company a “shaking down”.
IBM was assigned 9,043 patents in the US in 2017, topping the list of recipients of US patents for the 25th year in a row. The 2017 figure was a 12% increase from the year before, and triple the number of patents the company received a decade ago.
The technology company has acquired over 100,000 patents in the last 25 years and LaFontaine doesn’t see this momentum slowing down. “We’re going to get, probably, 30 patents issued every day this year”, he predicted.
Lyle Ellis, senior IPR manager of commercial operations and IP at Vodafone, was also on the panel.
Ellis said the telecommunications conglomerate is “primarily a service company” which uses and builds equipment developed by other companies. As such, “we’re approached a reasonable amount” by NPEs claiming the rights to technology used by Vodafone, he explained.
However, Ellis said that over the past decade he has not been approached by any NPE with a case that he can actually put forward to the company’s financial and business divisions.
“I’m not trying to avoid paying money for valid IP,” he said, but when it comes to NPEs asserting patents, “nobody so far has come up with a really strong, convincing argument” about why Vodafone should be paying.
TPN Europe was hosted by World IP Review.
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